In between all the jokes I now get about road signs being spelt correctly, and anything else for that matter (I have become the spelling police) I went to a special planning sub committee meeting to look at the draft Section 106 agreements for three of the large sites to be developed as part of the Southern Leighton Buzzard Development.
For those that don't know, section 106 (planning gain) is the section of planning acts that allow the council (SBDC) to request money from developers to pay for the town's much needed infrastructure.
The drafts we saw suggested that all the developments in the south would contribute 2.5 million pounds towards transport. We worked out we would need more like £25 million. For education the figure was something like £8 million which we thought was about a third of what was actually needed. We are even asking for just short of half a million for public art :)
So our revised version is asking for a huge amount more but we feel this more realistically represent the amount of money infrastructure costs to sustain a development that developers are so keen to stick anywhere.
We have asked for some changes too to the timing of the handover of community facilities. Generally developers like to wait until around 75% of the development is occupied before even starting work on some community facilities. We have requested they build them once the first house is built in some cases so we don’t have a repeat of
My request is in too, asking developers to ensure we have adequate cycle routes between the developments, to the town centre, and on to the station. So you might not be able to drive through town but at least you can cycle!
It’s a shame we could not at this stage request that developments are built with solar panels, water recycling and so on but that will come when they detailed planning applications are put in (I hope).
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